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Winner of Best Poster in the category of Business & Humanities,Tadhg Blommerde

Winner of Best Poster in the category of Business & Humanities, School of Business PhD student Tadhg Blommerde is a researcher with RIKON

Winner of Best Poster in the category of Business & Humanities is Tadhg Blommerde.

Tadhg presented his poster at the event on the topic of ‘A service innovation capability maturity model for small and medium-sized enterprises’ which he is undertaking as a focus for his PhD studies with the supervision of an academic from the School of Business in WIT (Dr Patrick Lynch).

Tadhg graduated from his undergraduate studies in WIT with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Studies before taking up the opportunity to further his studies with the RIKON research team within WIT.

Research focus

Speaking about his research focus, Tadhg described the area as, “Small and medium-sized enterprises in the service sector must continuously innovate and adapt to ensure their survival.” He continued, “They [SMEs] accomplish this through their service innovation capability, a dynamic capability underpinning the repeated generation of new services or improvement of existing ones.”

Explaining the underlying problems facing businesses in this area, “However, despite the significance of this capability there are no tools to support its measurement or management. As a result, organisations are unaware of their service innovation capability performance or where to direct resources or attention for its improvement”, he added.

Positioning his research ambition to solve this problem, he said, “this study rigorously develops a staged maturity model and accompanying index to evaluate the sophistication of this key capability and direct managerial attention to areas of strength and weakness.”

Future plans

Thinking about the future, Tadhg provided a crisp view of how he sees his career progression, “I understand the doctorate as a first step. I want to advance much further as a quantitative social science research professional and understand that an international postdoctorate is the best option for this”.